Dedication of St. John Lateran November 9, 2025
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
It’s like a mythical alignment of the stars that novels and movies sometimes use for important plotlines; a rare coincidence that only happens once a decade or century or millennium. In this case, it’s every seven years. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the surprising number of special feast days that happened to fall on Sundays in the year 2025.
Normally in the Church, Sundays are important feasts in their own right. Easter is also always a Sunday. Most of our other feasts, however, follow a specific date no matter what day: Annunciation is March 25th. Most of the time, when one of those feasts falls on a Sunday – St. Bartholomew the Apostle on August 24th – Sunday wins and you just don’t celebrate that feast again until next year. Some feasts, however, are special enough that they win and the Sunday gets bumped. That usually happens about once a year. In 2025, however, it happened five times. The Presentation of the Lord on February 2nd bumped off the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time. Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29th bumped off the 13th Sunday. The Exaltation of the Cross on September 14th bumped off the 22nd Sunday. Last week, All Souls Day bumped off the 31st Sunday. And finally today’s Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome bumps off the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time.
The last time this happened was in 2014. It almost happened in 2020, but since that was a leap year, it pushed it off for another round. Sometimes it’s 5 or 6 years between and sometimes it’s 10 or 11, but it averages out to once every 7 years.
So, does it mean that 2025 is some mystically important year where the stars align and supernatural things happen? No. Really, it’s just a coincidence that I find fascinating as the diocesan liturgist. It’s my job to pay attention to the details of the liturgical calendar. Yet, it is an excellent occasion to think about the reality of time how our eternal God-who-is-beyond-time interacts with us in time.
What I really want you take away from all of that calendar stuff is the impression that our lives are part of a larger fabric of time, eternity, and community. Maybe it’s not obvious from the summary, but there really is a good and logical explanation for all of those chronological complexities. Even if you don’t understand them all, they matter to us. Why? Because we belong to the Church, the Body of Christ.
Today’s feast is somewhat unhelpfully named, the “Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome.” What’s that? It’s when we celebrate how Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal and donated a bunch of buildings to us. On Nov 9, 324 A.D. we dedicated one of those buildings as our first Cathedral. Just as Bishop Deshotel has the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Lafayette so Pope Leo XIV has the Archbascilica Cathedral of St. John Lateran in Rome. Lateran is the name of the hill it’s on. “St. John” means both John the Baptist and John the Apostle.
Because St. John Lateran is the pope’s Cathedral, it is also a symbol of the whole Church. That’s why this feast overrides a Sunday. Today, we celebrate our communion with the Pope and with the whole Church, we give thanks for all our church buildings, and we pray for those who lack the freedom to build and gather in their own churches.
What’s interesting is that this feast usually overrides a Sunday in the same year that four other feasts also override a Sunday. I think we Catholics get that buildings matter. We understand the importance of space and of stuff. Because we are Catholic, we gather inside Catholic Churches. We get baptized in them, married in them, and we pass through them after death. We use stuff for our sacraments. But this little “alignment of the stars” in time is, to me, a wink from God reminding us that the Church is as much about time as it is about space. Your Catholicity affects your location, but how much does it affect your calendar? Does your Catholic faith ever interrupt your calendar in the way these special feasts interrupt the usual flow of Sundays? Do the different themes, colors, and flavors of liturgical seasons actually affect how you view your time, your life, your priorities?
It’s not that I or anyone expects you to know all the technical details like what I described at the beginning. Priests don’t have all that memorized – they ask me. I don’t have those details memorized either, I look them up when someone asks. But you don’t have to memorize every detail in order to live a liturgical rhythm of life. To some extent, we still do Lent pretty well with the meatless Fridays and our chosen penances. But, there are 4 other liturgical seasons plus some of those special feasts I mentioned. Do they impact our lives? Do they affect our lives in the way the Church asks us to be affected?
Besides resting on Sunday and going to Mass, the liturgical calendar offers different emphases throughout the year. Lent is penitential, Easter is Joyful. Ordinary Time is about structure and growth, not plainness. Even as Ordinary time progresses, the readings and prayers gradually shift focus from conversion to discipleship to evangelization to preparing for the end of the world. Normally, these last few weeks use readings focused on the end of the world.
And you’d think the Christmas season is one we do well. It’s about joy and family and doing good for others, right? It’s a season which celebrates how God joined the human family and gave himself as a gift to us. The only problem is that is not how most people actually treat Christmas. That, and the fact that almost everyone does it at the wrong time. Rather than follow the Church’s lead by observing Advent and then Christmas, we start saying “Merry Christmas” the day after Thanksgiving… or even right after Halloween. And it becomes all about the gifts, the money, the sales. Never mind Advent’s focus on penance, preparing for the end of the world, and the power of hope… we’ve got parties to throw and gifts to buy! And once Christmas day hits, we’re done! Decorations down, back to ordinary life… who cares about the three weeks the Church devotes to meditating on the humility of Jesus Christ and rejoicing?
“Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” Jesus drives merchants out of a sacred space because their greedy presence blinds people to God’s loving presence. Well, how about we drive the merchants out of our sacred time because us paying attention to them blinds us to the ways God is paying attention to us. Advent starts in 3 weeks. On this feast of honoring our union with the whole Catholic Church, consider how you will honor that union with your time. You are the temple of God. Your body, your soul, and your time are meant to be filled with the spirit of God. How will you drive out the merchants of sin, the merchants of selfishness, the merchants of distraction? How will you tear down the old so that Jesus Christ can rebuild himself in you?
How will you participate in the sacred time of Advent? Start with the obvious – staying faithful to Mass, Confession, and daily prayer. Then, consider: How will Advent feel, look, sound, taste, and smell different from Ordinary Time? From Christmas? From what the world does? What can you add to or subtract from the daily routine? What prayers and devotions, what fasts or sacrifices, what décor and hobbies will show you, your family, and your community that you answer not to the world, but to Jesus Christ whose body is the Church not only in space, but also in time? Will the “stars align” in your life for Christ and his Church? Or for the fruitless coins of the money-changers?